Ask Moshe

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
641

[quote]SexMachine wrote:

[quote]Varqanir wrote:

[quote]Chushin wrote:
You ok, man?[/quote]

Clearly he was not at the time.[/quote]

You’re not wrong there. What was I thinking putting this in JB’s thread. It’s supposed to be my own thread. I’d appreciate it if you could move it to ‘The Ancient Civilisations’ or something like that Mods. And yes, most my family were just wiped out. Please no sympathy of any sort.

I don’t tend to reveal things like that on the net but the anti-depressants the docs gave me and booze had bizarre side effects including dyslexia. Anyway, I feel inclined to do a piece on the Phoenicians: a people of unknown origin(although some scholars allege the Persian Gulf) who we first hear about occupying the valleys of the Eastern slopes of modern Lebanon. A sea faring people they grew rich though trade; their commodities were Lebanese cedar for ship building and a purple die that could be yielded exclusively from a mollusc in their region. This royal purple was particularly valuable as it as used by royalty across the globe, ringing the edge of the toga of every Roma optimatate, or colouring the entire garment of a Roman aristocrat who wished to show he attained to high position.

To the Phoenicians we owe one of the most important innovations in history: writing(they adapted the Egyptian pictogram.) By the time of the Trojan War (1250BE) they had established no less than six powerful city states. The city of Byblos, from where we get the word Bible, was to become the most important city state until Tyre(also a Phoenician state of the Mediterranean) became the most power due to its strategic location and its abundance of skilled masons(and there is ample evidence that they built Solomon’s temple. When Jerusalem was sacked in 70AD the spoils were used to build the Coliseum and Jewish slaves helped build it likely upon the plans of Phoenician and probably Jewish and Greek architects.

When Cyrus the Great conquered the Phoenicians in 539 they were allotted four governors and continued to flourish until the time of Alexander when his army built a mole, sacked the city and sold the residents into slavery. Other Phoenician states continued to flourish such as Carthage. Carthage had an impression agricultural system, a huge navy with a circular military harbour and lastly a huge quantity of slaves from which they suffered rebellions that would make Spartacus look like a riot.

Well that’s enough for now…

EDITED[/quote]

I remember the first time I tried pot, too.

642

Moshe, just want to say this is by far my favorite discussion in a long time on any forum. This is one subject I know little about and has been quite eye opening and enlightening in a sense.

643

[quote]Jewbacca wrote:

[quote]edmontonalberta wrote:
I was wondering if Jewish faith was used often to help soldiers of the IDF integrate back into society after long combat missions. I have read that a large portion of the Israeli population has seen combat, and one never hears of PTSD of the IDF (here at least), where as here that is heard very often for soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. [/quote]

This is a very interesting question, and one that is being asked by a lot of people.

For those that don’t know, the rate of PTSD for combat troops in basically every country that studied it (USA, Canada, European nations, Korea, Russia, etc) is about 30%. Very consistent across countries. But in Israel, the PTSD rate is about 1%., and it has been studied since the Yom Kippur war.

So, obviously, everyone is wondering what is the deal?

As a religious Jew, I would love to say the reason is Judaism, but Israel is roughly 50% secular, and the IDF (while it had religious soldiers such as myself) was distinctly secular. And, more importantly, there is little or no difference on PTSD rates between religious soldiers and non-religious. (The religious soldiers do fair better by a rate of .75 to 1.25 or so, but it’s a small overall change compared to IDF soldiers vs. other soldiers.) So I think this miracle has some pretty Earthly reasons behind it.

Here are the guesses that have been hypothezised:

  1. Mandatory conscription results in everyone having very similar experiences. Literally every person you meet; every fellow citizen (excepting arabs who can join the IDF, but it’s not mandatory – many Israeli arabs happily defend Israel) is or was a solider. So there is a massive informal support network in place. You mom is not just your mom, but an ex-soldier.

Same with dad, brothers, sisters, and everyone you went to high school with and work with and everyone you go to Shul with. So having people to talk to and who understand what is going on is not a problem. People already know. I can speak for myself (I was not much of a soldier — a combat engineer – but due to the nature of our wars being in our home, I repeatedly found myself in combat.

  1. We fight for our home. Fighting in some far-off land for reasons that are not exactly clear sucks and makes for an unhappy soldier. Here, we are defending our home from basically two religious sects that have decided we, as a people, must be eradicated from the Earth. This is pretty easy to understand and makes for a motivated soldier.

  2. Being a home war, you can go home. As in, for a while, I was reporting for duty every morning at 5:00 am, but sleeping most nights with my wife and kids at my parents’ home. Again, having that support is key.

  3. The civilians are just as much victims of fighting as you are. Gush Katif, my home growing up, was repeatedly shelled, with the foreign arabs specifically targeting my school or our school busses. So you just get used to a certain level of crap.

  4. Israelis, as a people, are just survivors. Basically all of us have relatives who fled the Nazi death camps, were expelled during the ethnic cleansing in all the Islamic countries of their Jewish populations, survived the Soviet gulags, etc. In order to live through something like that, you have to have a pretty good outlook on life, be it genetic or perhaps religious.

Regardless, we are all descendants of the people who were too damn stubborn to die or had coping skills to become normal people after that sort of thing. I think this carries on.

  1. A key religious prophecy in Judaism is that all the nations of the world will turn against us as a people and that, with G-d’s help, we will survive. Even the non-religious Jews believe this at some level, and the prophecy proves itself out on a weekly basis in the selective outrage from the press and, in particular the UN.

I mean, the arabs in the portions of Judea and Samaria they occupy (or even “Arab East Jerusalem” that is arab only because of mass murder and ethnic cleansing of its Jewish population in the late 1920s) can do horrible things like, say, blowing my wife and unborn son up, but if Israeli bomb harms a purported civilian because Hamas intentionally puts rocket launchers in populated areas, Israel is guilty of war crimes. Not a peep about blowing up families going to market on a bus, however. Anyway, the feeling of “fait accomply” provides a level of “I don’t give a shit anymore” which also helps with PTSD.

Note, none of these are my own ideas. Of the ones I think are most important, I think it’s 1, 2, and 5.[/quote]

This is good stuff.

644

[quote]ZJStrope wrote:
Moshe, just want to say this is by far my favorite discussion in a long time on any forum. This is one subject I know little about and has been quite eye opening and enlightening in a sense.

[/quote]

Thank you very much. I made this thread because people are so often confused about Judaism and Israel, in no part because Jewish people are very reluctant to talk about Judaism, due to historical reasons.

Me, being a typical Israeli, however, have no problems running my mouth. Still, do remember, I am no great Rabbi. Just an Israeli engineer turned lawyer and no deep theologic thinker.

645

Sorry if this has been asked JB, but do the Jewish people celebrate the New Years holiday the same as most, i.e. parties and midnight toasts?

646

[quote]UtahLama wrote:
Sorry if this has been asked JB, but do the Jewish people celebrate the New Years holiday the same as most, i.e. parties and midnight toasts?[/quote]

Well, it’s the secular new year, so kind of. In Israel, there are typically two dates on everything, secular and Hebrew calendars.

As an aside, parts of the Orthodox Christian world do this, as well. This is why the Roman and Orthodox Easters usually don’t match up.

647

[quote]Jewbacca wrote:

[quote]ZJStrope wrote:
Moshe, just want to say this is by far my favorite discussion in a long time on any forum. This is one subject I know little about and has been quite eye opening and enlightening in a sense.

[/quote]

Thank you very much. I made this thread because people are so often confused about Judaism and Israel, in no part because Jewish people are very reluctant to talk about Judaism, due to historical reasons.

Me, being a typical Israeli, however, have no problems running my mouth. Still, do remember, I am no great Rabbi. Just an Israeli engineer turned lawyer and no deep theologic thinker. [/quote]

Haha thanks for the qualification here.

On a personal note, why did you change from an engineer to a lawyer? And given the condition of law, at least in the US, are you happy with your decision? I’d PM this question to you, but I believe PM still does not work.

If you prefer to not answer this b/c of the off-topic content, no issues with that :slight_smile:

648

[quote]Jewbacca wrote:

[quote]UtahLama wrote:
Sorry if this has been asked JB, but do the Jewish people celebrate the New Years holiday the same as most, i.e. parties and midnight toasts?[/quote]

Well, it’s the secular new year, so kind of. In Israel, there are typically two dates on everything, secular and Hebrew calendars.

As an aside, parts of the Orthodox Christian world do this, as well. This is why the Roman and Orthodox Easters usually don’t match up.[/quote]

Do you and your family celebrate tonight? Or do you prefer to only celebrate on the Hebrew holiday?

649 
Thank you, but one could say the Soviet Union had a similar reasons to not have a high rate of PTSD according to this criteria yet it still existed although I read it was not as high as British or American but on par with Germany- universal conscription and that they were also facing a war of survival against the Nazis. Slavic people,Jews and other people in the USSR were all classed as Untermensch, witnessing the suffering of civilians, losing homes, losing family, being survivors from the GULAG system, state organized famine and the Red Terror etc

Of course being able to go home everyday must be a true blessing, but I just don't think that would decrease it by that much. Maybe it does- having been in high stress situations and being to unwind deeply every night most likely builds resilience, instead of not having deep recovery that other soldiers may experience. Sort of like overtraining.

There have been studies of higher intelligence being a protection against PTSD and I read somewhere that Israel did have a higher average IQ, would you agree with this?
 Since there is a very low rate, is there no institutions from the government, literature, non profit organizations, etc or do they still exist, just on a smaller scale?
650

[quote]UtahLama wrote:

[quote]Jewbacca wrote:

[quote]UtahLama wrote:
Sorry if this has been asked JB, but do the Jewish people celebrate the New Years holiday the same as most, i.e. parties and midnight toasts?[/quote]

Well, it’s the secular new year, so kind of. In Israel, there are typically two dates on everything, secular and Hebrew calendars.

As an aside, parts of the Orthodox Christian world do this, as well. This is why the Roman and Orthodox Easters usually don’t match up.[/quote]

Do you and your family celebrate tonight? Or do you prefer to only celebrate on the Hebrew holiday?[/quote]

Not particularly, but it has nothing to do with religion. All the amatuer drunks come out.

651

[quote]Jewbacca wrote:

[quote]UtahLama wrote:

[quote]Jewbacca wrote:

[quote]UtahLama wrote:
Sorry if this has been asked JB, but do the Jewish people celebrate the New Years holiday the same as most, i.e. parties and midnight toasts?[/quote]

Well, it’s the secular new year, so kind of. In Israel, there are typically two dates on everything, secular and Hebrew calendars.

As an aside, parts of the Orthodox Christian world do this, as well. This is why the Roman and Orthodox Easters usually don’t match up.[/quote]

Do you and your family celebrate tonight? Or do you prefer to only celebrate on the Hebrew holiday?[/quote]

Not particularly, but it has nothing to do with religion. All the amatuer drunks come out.[/quote]

Hahaha so very true.

652

BTW PTSD is real. My only surviving great grandfather of WWI would shake uncontrollably, his personality changed dramatically and he began beating his wife and children.

Anyway, the Assyrian were a Semitic people of Babylonian origin. Their civilisation flourished for nearly 15,000 years. At the beginning of the 6th century BE they were conquered by their Babylonian forefathers, then the Persians, then the Achaemenids followed by the Macedonians/Seleucids, then the Parthians followed by the Romans.

It was renamed Syria during the rule of Mithridates I, and Assuristan after the Parthian conquest. The Parthians contained little control leading to semi-autonomous kingdoms like Adiabene composed of Jewish exiles and numerous other semi-autonomous city states.

Adiabene like the rest of Mesopotama was conquered by Trajan in 117AD. Depictions of this victory and that over the Germans can be seen on his column in Rome. Trajan pointed renamed the region ‘Assyria.’

653

[quote] There have been studies of higher intelligence being a protection against PTSD and I read somewhere that Israel did have a higher average IQ, would you agree with this?
[/quote]

The IQ is higher among the Jewish population, yes, with the Ashkenazi average IQ being 115ish, with other “whites” being 100. More importantly, genius-level IQ is 10% of the population, vs. 1%. Israel is not, however, solely Ashkenazi. You have Sephardim, Mizrahim, and arabs, with the Mizrahim and arabs being below the “white” average.

Long story short, there is a bi-modal distribution of IQ among Israel, that more-or-less hits 100 for the mean — but few are actually the mean compared to a classic bell curve.

So, I am not sure this would matter. Regardless, I’ve never seen studies regarding PTSD and IQ, and don’t know of any.

[quote]

Since there is a very low rate, is there no institutions from the government, literature, non profit organizations, etc or do they still exist, just on a smaller scale?[/quote]

They still exist and the situation is taken seriously, largely because while we’re dealing with 1-2% of the combat veterans, 1-2% of combat veterans is a disproportionately large part of the country where everyone is a veteran.

To restate that another way, let’s say 10% of the USA are veterans (a made up statistic) and 20% have PTSD, you have 2/100 of the USA population as a whole with PTSD.

Let’s say 100% of Israelis are combat veterans or civilians who have underwent some sort of attack (also a made up stat, but I am keeping the math easy) and 2% have PTSD 2/100 Israeli population as a whole would have PTSD.

So, as a country, we have the same issues as everyone else, per capita, more or less.

654

Here is one of about 20 articles relevant to the question of IQ and PTSD:

J Neuropsychiatry Clin Neurosci. 2008 Summer;20(3):309-16. doi: 10.1176/appi.neuropsych.20.3.309.
Cognitive dysfunctions associated with PTSD: evidence from World War II prisoners of war.
Hart J Jr, Kimbrell T, Fauver P, Cherry BJ, Pitcock J, Booe LQ, Tillman G, Freeman TW.
Author information

Abstract
The authors aim to delineate cognitive dysfunction associated with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by evaluating a well-defined cohort of former World War II prisoners of war (POWs) with documented trauma and minimal comorbidities. The authors studied a cross-sectional assessment of neuropsychological performance in former POWs with PTSD, PTSD with other psychiatric comorbidities, and those with no PTSD or psychiatric diagnoses. Participants who developed PTSD had average IQ, while those who did not develop PTSD after similar traumatic experiences had higher IQs than average (approximately 116). Those with PTSD performed significantly less well in tests of selective frontal lobe functions and psychomotor speed. In addition, PTSD patients with co-occurring psychiatric conditions experienced impairment in recognition memory for faces. Higher IQ appears to protect individuals who undergo a traumatic experience from developing long-term PTSD, while cognitive dysfunctions appear to develop with or subsequent to PTSD. These distinctions were supported by the negative and positive correlations of these cognitive dysfunctions with quantitative markers of trauma, respectively. There is a suggestion that some cognitive decrements occur in PTSD patients only when they have comorbid psychiatric diagnoses.
PMID: 18806234 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

655

This is going viral in Israel; pretty funny.

656

[quote]Jewbacca wrote:

They still exist and the situation is taken seriously, largely because while we’re dealing with 1-2% of the combat veterans, 1-2% of combat veterans is a disproportionately large part of the country where everyone is a veteran.[/quote]

That’s true. But for the purposes of this conversation can you describe a combat veteran. Not to belittle the IDF but ancient warfare involved stabbing people repeatedly with spears/sarisas face to face. The phalanx was usually eight deep and the men at the back were ordered to push forward so the front line delved into the enemy as at Thermopylae. They wore no shoes so they wouldn’t slip in the blood. Medieval Warfare largely involved siege warfare and cavalry charges by ‘knights’ so that one doesn’t really count until the British innovation of the longbow in the 100 years war and Agincourt and Crecy.

The 19th century began with the defeat of Napoleon and a new respect for the British navay. The Zulu War, the Siege of Malakand and the Mahdist War exposed European troops outside the Balkans with the tactics of Guerrilla Warfare culminiating in the Boar War and a wave of British Nationalism, often taken out on the Irish. The Mahdist War in the Sudan and the British experience in Afghanistan/Pakistan introduced them to fanatical religous human wave attacks although explorers of The Big Game had come accross such earlier.

WWI involved millions of young men being gassed, shelled and ordered to charge from trenches to their certain deaths on occasions. The ‘creeping charge’ alone was thought to account for 10% of casualties on the side shelling. In places outside the continent where provisions could not be provided men died of disentry and other diseases. One on Gallipoli was found drowned in a toilet. He was unable to get out.

WWII was too varied to count as a variable. Exactly what do you mean by ‘combat veterans?’

657

Combat veterans means combat veterans. It means you were in what was designated a combat area, whether official or not.

658

Alright thank you, I think my follow up questions would derail the thread unfortunately. Ill try and think of some more relevant material, because this thread is really interesting.

659

[quote]ZJStrope wrote:
Combat veterans means combat veterans. It means you were in what was designated a combat area, whether official or not.
[/quote]

WTF?

660

[quote]edmontonalberta wrote:
Alright thank you, I think my follow up questions would derail the thread unfortunately. Ill try and think of some more relevant material, because this thread is really interesting. [/quote]

I apologize. I had too much Pino Noir and tried to start my own thread to help understand ancient cultures of the Middle East and Mediterranean, beginning with the Akkadian, Babytlonian and with special emphasis on the Minoans, Phoenecia and Mycenenans. And their relation to

Unfortunately I fucked up firstly by posting in JB’s thread, secondly that no one gives a shit and thirdly by failing to get the Mods to move my posts to my own thread.